Physicist bags Templeton prize

A physicist who performed his PhD with the Nobel-prize-winning physicist Louis de Broglie has received this year’s £1m Templeton Prize, which is awarded for “progress toward research or discoveries about spiritual realities”. Bernard d’Espagnat, a French physicist and philosopher of science, won the prize for his work on the philosophical implications of quantum mechanics by laying the theoretical groundwork for experimentally testing the violation of Bell’s inequalities.

The Templeton Prize was established in 1972 by the late philanthropist Sir John Templeton. According to the Templeton Foundation, the award is intended to encourage the concept that resources and manpower are needed to accelerate progress in spiritual discoveries. Physicists have been particularly successful in recent years: former laureates include Michael Heller (2008), John Barrow (2006), Charles Townes (2005), George Ellis (2004), John Polkinghorne (2002), Freeman Dyson (2000) and Paul Davies (1995).

Born in 1921, d’Espagnat has spent his career working on the discrepancies between quantum mechanics and the common-sense way of thinking how the world works. He studied at the Ecole Polytechnique before doing a PhD in particle physics at the Institut Henri Poincare in Paris under the supervision of de Broglie. After spending seven years as a research scientist with Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago in the US he was appointed a senior researcher at CERN until 1959 and helped with creating the lab’s famous theoretical division.

In a tangle

When d’Espagnat returned to Paris in the 1960s he became interested in verifying the theory of quantum mechanics. In 1964, John Bell, then working at Stanford University, published a theorem that showed it could be possible to check if the picture of the world as described by quantum mechanics was correct.

Bell showed that a particular combination of measurements performed on identically prepared pairs of particles would produce a numerical bound --today called a Bell’s inequality -- that is satisfied by all physical theories. He also showed, however, that this bound is violated by the predictions of quantum physics for entangled particle pairs. Bell’s inequality thus opened up the possibility of testing specific underlying assumptions of physical theories

If Bell’s inequalities were violated, by showing that measurements performed on entangled particles can apparently have an instantaneous influence on one another -- then quantum mechanics would be correct. Many physicists, including Albert Einstein, thought that quantum mechanics was incorrect, or incomplete, since it violated the principle of “locality” – that an object is only influenced by its immediate surroundings.

D’Espagnat worked on ways to experimentally test Bell’s inequalities and thus provide an answer to whether the theory of quantum mechanics or the principle of locality best described nature. “We had to make the test,” Bernhard d’Espagnat told physicsworld.com, “in order to check if quantum mechanics was indeed true.”

The proof finally came in 1981 when experiments on polarised photons by fellow countryman Alain Aspect, whom d’Espagnat worked closely with, showed that Bell’s inequalities were indeed violated and thus quantum mechanics is correct.

Big spender

D’Espagnat, 87, who was born a Catholic, is also a prolific writer having penned over 20 books, including a best-selling book in France, which explained to a non-specialists the implications of Bell’s inequalities for our understating of the physical world. In 1983 the book was published in English as In Search of Reality, the Outlook of a Physicist.

With the £1m award, d’Espagnat is planning to give a third to his family, a third to charity and the rest for research. “I have not decided yet how to spend the money for research, whether I will give it to a public or private university,” says d’Espagnat.

In a statement d’Espagnat said “I feel myself deeply in accordance with the Templeton Foundation’s great, guiding idea that science does shed light [on spirituality]. In my view it does so mainly by rendering unbelievable an intellectual construction claiming to yield access to the ultimate ground of things with the sole use of the simple, somewhat trivial notions everybody has.”

Who decides ?

Extended Reality Now

Because Bernard d'Espagnat has started his scientific quest with Louis de Broglie and afterwards dealt much with greater understanding of quantum mechanics, but also knowing today's critical state of fundamental physics and a tentative problem solution by de Broglie, a truly efficient use of thus intended investment of a part of this reward would be further, explicitly problem-solving development of de Broglie's approach completing the original ideas and providing a working solution to problems at stake (see e.g. arxiv.org…9911107 and further references). It's not really about money and not only about this money (although deep correlations are evident), it's about the sheer necessity to turn indeed to "another reality" in science, not an artificially mystified world of abstract "models" exclusively supported within "traditional" research (with sad results), but the causally complete, physically real and still highly nontrivial, "dynamically complex" system of strongly interacting elementary entities producing explicitly EMERGENT world structures, with their now causally explained and intrinsically unified properties. Not only there is a deep correspondence with the original, causal ideas of Louis de Broglie and other genuine fathers of the "new physics" now successfully completed, but even last experimental observations confirm the validity of this approach and give rise to further, already huge doubts about sufficiency of usual "models". As to implication of "spiritual dimensions", it is properly reconstituted either, within the same, provably universal approach but rather at superior levels of UNREDUCED dynamic complexity (to be distinguished from its dominating "statistical" imitations, see unifiedcomplexity.go… for more details).

In a more general outlook, the well-known "inertia", if not corruption, of usual, public ways of fundamental science support leads only to never-ending reproduction of evident stagnation, "unsolvable" old and catastrophically accumulating new problems, leading to sadly confirmed "end of science" conclusion. Brave new private, but also highly "corporate" science investors like John Templeton Foundation tend to inherit unfortunately those deadly sins of official science system in their CURRENT research activity support (simply because they tend to rely exclusively on the same scientific authorities that already profit from a more than comfortable public support but demonstrate no consistent problem solution). With due respect to all previous "high efforts" in fundamental physics and just BASED on this respect, shouldn't one finally find a way to support provably efficient and thus necessarily EXTENDED (essentially more consistent) problem solutions, especially at a time when they are so urgently needed, in fundamental physics and beyond? And what if the same approach that allows for a truly consistent solution of fundamental physical problems can also provide crucial advance in applied problem solution, in physics (e.g. new energy) but also biology, medicine, ecology, intelligent informatics and social life, at SUPERIOR levels of the SAME unreduced world complexity? What if it's time now to definitely get out of intrinsic limitations of the "cutting", separating and imitating tradition of scholar science approach showing its glaring inefficiency today (and clearly denounced already by de Broglie and so many others)? Qualitatively new needs and results are both more than ready, but who can dare to support the true, provable, problem-solving progress in science? Think it over, masters, for you are the first to win or to lose everything in that unique reality which we used to share (but where you are the only competitive participants!), and this is a kind of crucial today's "exam" one cannot avoid or postpone to future.

d"Espagnat Templeton Prize

In the last sentence of the article, should not `unbelievable' be replaced with `believable' ?"In my view it does so mainly by rendering unbelievable an intellectual construction claiming to yield access to the ultimate ground of things with the sole use of the simple, somewhat trivial notions everybody has.”If BD is referring to the relativistic view that QM should be local, this would seem to be in accord with "simple notions that everybody has".If QM should be non-local, that is clealy non-trivial.Which viewpoint supposedly connotes `spirituality' ?And what does the latter imply ? Existence of A god or a warm, fuzzy feeling inside about the structure of the physical world ?Clearly the TF is footing a big prize every year to shore up and propagate their fundamentalist leader's beliefs, largely unshared by the scientific community, that science and religon mutually corroborate the other.Nothing would constitute a greater distortion of the scientific realities discovered over the last 2 centuries. And as Richard Dawkins asserts, "No child is born Catholic, Protestant, Islamic, etc. Their parents are."